Monday, 29 July 2019

Tuning Up 2019is a collaboration between HMP Whitemoor, Britten Sinfonia, Orchestras Live and Lemos&Crane. Following our hugely successfulworkshops and concerts at HMP Whitemoor in June 2018, we are now planning the first ever orchestral music festival for staff and residents of HMP Whitemoor as well as family and friends. During the autumn musicians from Britten Sinfonia will be working with a group of staff and residents to make a new piece inspired by 946-3, a new collaboration between two living greats of contemporary arts - the composer Steve Reich and the artist Gerhard Richter.

Steve Reich: the composer who redefined the very concept of rhythm – and whose vitality interrogates and transforms everything it touches. Gerhard Richter: a titan of contemporary art, a master of light capable of charging abstract forms with intense emotional power.

Together with Britten Sinfonia they’ve combined original music and digital visuals, algorithmically derived from Richter’s painting “946-3”, to create an artwork that is boundlessly more than the sum of its parts. “A stream of images, its rhythmic flow interpreted by music and, at the same time, a musical composition visualized by film images” is how Richter describes a collaboration that’s likely to be one of the most significant moments in contemporary art this year. The piece will receive its European premiere at the Barbican on October 23rd.

The day after, October 24th, at HMP Whitemoor Britten Sinfonia players, staff, residents and family and friends will come together at a concert that will end a one-day music festival in the prison to perform the work they have created inspired by the Reich/Richter piece.